Abstract

"Popular Credit Instruments, Financialization, and Slavery in Seventeenth-Century Havana"

Adriana Chira, Emory University (achira@emory.edu)

Starting with 1640, in Havana, people of middling means situated outside global circuits of capital participated in the financialization of enslaved people’s bodies through a popular credit instrument known as retroventa (a reverse sale akin to a pawnship). These instruments helped owners get access to cash in a society that ran low on liquidity, while retaining access to the people they owned at a time when the slave trade to the island was going through a brief decline. These credit instruments also enabled owners to temporarily sell shares in an enslaved person to multiple individuals, opening up access to slave ownership to a cross-sector of Havana’s society, and helping in the collectivization of risk (especially high mortality risk among enslaved people due to yellow fever).
Retroventas pivoted around short-term speculation about enslaved people’s capacity to labor, not just the actual value of labor in and of itself. In addition, sometimes, the retroventas themselves were sold or passed on among heirs of their owners or to their owners’ other creditors and therefore treated as secondary debt. Unlike mortgages and securities used in the slave trade or for plantations in North America, the retroventas relied on fewer abstractions and spawned dense relations of co-dependence among a wide cross-sector of the city’s inhabitants who interacted with one another. Enslaved people’s bodies and behaviors were capitalized, subject to observation day in and day out, and long before the making of the infamous accounting systems described by scholars of the antebellum US South plantation systems. Those social relations through which observations and control of the enslaved occurred were the mechanisms that allowed the retroventa markets to function. But they could also be the means that could disrupt them and open avenues for manumission for the enslaved.